Things Between
by AtheneMiranda
Summary: Or: Five times Frank Jaeger had inappropriate feelings for his CO and one time he didn't. Unrequited Fox/BB, and some Fox/Gustava too.


I wrote this for the mgs_slash Trick-Or-Treat Meme, so thanks to sunonhair for the prompt! It was: _I'd like some one sided Null/BB(preferably as an adult), where Null after years of abuse and undeveloped emotional intelligence somehow starts developing an unhealthy, somehow romantic obsession with BB._

Never knew there was a length limit on fic titles until I tried to post this. :/ I used the original title as a summary instead.

This fic has some slashiness, some het and some voyeurism - CEILING FOX forever, XD

* * *

_Five times Frank Jaeger had inappropriate feelings for his CO and one time he didn't_

_I_

Big Boss had a name for him, and it was like a thin layer that he wore between his skin and his clothes - a cover that other people would see when they looked at him, touch when they shook his hand, and remain impermeable no matter how many scars it took. He was Frank Jaeger.

The person he was on the outside had a code and a rank and a long brown trenchcoat, and he strapped a gun to its hip and learned to say it, tonelessly, in a way that made people as intimidated as they had ever been by the Perfect Soldier. He was Gray Fox.

He stepped into his new names and let himself fill the space they described; two lives where there used to be none. And Big Boss was the commanding officer of one of them, and the rescuer of the other. Both began in the same place, and led back to it.

He stayed close to Big Boss. He needed to. And he had a lot to learn, about survival and infiltration and silence, how to move like he wasn't there at all, unnoticed and nameless. He made it a challenge to himself - decided he'd become so good that even his commander wouldn't realise he was there.

He didn't realise what success might mean until it happened.

It was a little before midnight when he successfully entered Big Boss's bedroom without being observed. He settled in a corner, resting on one knee and barely breathing, awaiting the right moment to reveal what he'd accomplished. There wasn't much light, just the glow from a security light outside the window and the dim red ember of a dying cigar, but it was enough for him to see his commander - not yet asleep, merely lying in his bed and stretching out his long limbs, naked and tired and uncoiling. Didn't know he was watched. He was awake and didn't know, and Null felt the exultation wash through his tense body. If he could do this he could do -

- _anything_, and he abruptly realised how vulnerable even Big Boss was before someone like him. He put an almost-shaking hand to the hilt of his machete. So unaware. If someone like Null came to kill Big Boss, then Null would have to protect him -

There was no one like him. He knew that.

He could kill _anyone_.

Big Boss didn't know he was there, and as he watched, his commander took his own penis in his hands, curling eight fingers tight around the shaft, a thumb moving in slow, unsteady circles over the flesh of the head. Null gripped his machete, and unsheathed the first inch of it. He shouldn't be there. He'd made a perfect infiltration of a place he should not be.

Infiltrators were made to rupture forbidden spaces. He tested his machete on his thumb, feeling a hot seam open in the skin. He couldn't stop watching. Big Boss's movements were becoming more targeted, his hands relaxed and his fingertips running up and down the thick vein on top his cock, squeezing against the shaft as he went. There was little finesse to what he was doing, but Null could see in him a focus that ran through the whole of his body, neck thrown back and hips moving slightly, knees straightening, feet stretching into points, hands still moving rhythmically.

A thumb and a forefinger crept down to hold the base of the cock, rubbing between dark curls of hair, spare fingers cupping his scrotum. Tightening. Stroking. There was a jumble of whispered names, ones Null recognised and ones he did not. None of his own - the names Big Boss had given him - were spoken, but a succession of others were hissed into the empty dark. Names directed at people who weren't there to hear.

Big Boss's hips arched up and he gave a wordless sound that could have been a grunt or a sigh. His hands stilled, and Null saw him relaxing into that same languor he'd been in when his agent had first entered the room. Big Boss reached out for a screwed-up handkerchief discarded beside his ashtray, and Null found he was taking easy deep breaths again, inhaling the scent of tobacco mingled with something raw and animal. It was the only way he had to try to capture what he'd just witnessed.

He kept still in his corner until Big Boss was sound asleep, touching his machete with two fingers, thinking.

-

_II_

When he returned to the battlefield he had a name, of sorts, something real, an elite among serial-numbered weapons. He was Gray Fox, not the blank he had been before. The battlefield wasn't the same any more -

But Big Boss was gone.

Fox was responsible for lesser men; Fox, and the jumped-up excuse for a CO whose directives crackled over the radio into his ears. He was vigilant, always - alert enough to realise how different this was from living in disjointed massacres and lost days, or weeks, of sleep when he wasn't being used.

He knew who was using him now. But not what he was being used for. There was no one to ask, even if he'd wanted to know; Big Boss was gone.

His rank - his missing hero - the battlefield - it was curled into a heavy lump of strain buried deep in the front of his head. He didn't sleep much. He didn't want or need to. His eyes became red and full of dust, and the unceasing use was curdling his mind and separating it into its constituent pieces, untangling the past from the present and the feelings he had names for and the ones he did not. Wasn't like it had been when Gene had kept him caged. He wasn't sure he could sleep if he tried.

But there was clarity in experiencing how different war was than before.

He was starting to _remember_.

There had been battlefields, always, corpses cut into ribbons - he groped backwards through the dim images, watched them reassemble into living soldiers. Enemies. Dead things that had left as soon as they had come, killed without a care for who he was or what he fought for - and then sleep, confined in a box full of fluid that sustained and suffocated him. He couldn't remember the spaces between the battles. They were like empty sheets of paper - unstained, as if the blood he'd spilt had somehow failed to seep out and soak them through. It was blank, wiped clean, every time. He wasn't even angry when Big Boss had found him again. Just confused. He wasn't angry when Big Boss left.

_Keep going back._ He remembered a burning, boyish rage that had gradually faded because he couldn't remember what he had to be angry about.

More dimly than that, he remembered the halfway point where he'd slipped over the gap between knowing and unknowing and fallen, helpless, inside it. He'd felt robbed of his bloodstained childhood and the petty vulgar power he had exercised with the edge of a hunting knife. But he had been losing himself, mind slipping and perceptions fading and no longer able to hear the voices droning orders and prescriptions. He'd been numbed by the drugs and small enough for four men to pick him up and throw him back in the culture tank -

- then there was nothingness, lost time in a place with no sight and no self, drifting away until only one faint light remained on his horizon. There were those islands of blood and awareness - battlefields. They had let him out so he could kill, and then returned him to where he belonged, floating ever further from the only glimmer of memory he had left -

It had come back and left him dazzled - he'd desperately tried to shade his eyes with blood. His life's second failure; so like the first that it had made him remember and jolted him awake again.

When Big Boss left him again, the last order he gave was to stay with FOXHOUND and obey the Patriots. For his own good. Even to Big Boss's detriment. Fox was too old to think himself abandoned, and too young not to.

Big Boss was gone, and he felt his life being pulled apart at the lacings - he had only ever had an untidy hash of feelings and memories, arrayed in pieces because there was nothing strong enough to draw them all into one whole, and now they were breaking up and tumbling into the void. He lost each new piece as soon as he grasped it.

He was Gray Fox, and there were other soldiers relying on him. He still had nothing to rely on but Big Boss - memory more dependable than presence.

So he took everything he understood about himself - scattered moments from a past, every impulse and instinct and choked need - and cemented it around the one memory that mattered, bit by bit, until his hands were empty again.

-

_III_

He took the little girl with him.

When she looked at him, Fox felt like he was being ripped apart by his own instincts. She was young and alone and when she looked up at him Fox could see the world through her eyes more easily than through his own, and it was grey and bloodstained and too full of fear and hunger for grief to even reach out from inside.

She was evidence, the remnant of a grievous error that he wanted to cut out of the world and never think of again. He needed to close her eyes for good, take her head from her body - a whole family in matching pieces - bury her, go back inside, forget this mission and sleep again.

He didn't know what to do - wasn't strong enough to hold back the two crushing walls of emotion - and there was only one way he could turn for guidance.

He took the little girl with him, because it was what Big Boss would have done. It was what he once _had_ done, after making a mistake that left a child with no other safe option. Fox didn't even have anywhere to take her, so he took her back to FOXHOUND's camp and steeled himself for comments about picking up orphaned strays.

There were none. None of them knew each other off the battlefield. And kids didn't belong there, not unless it was where they'd been born, or - as the pads of his fingers, his instinctive stance, his eyes, some vicious primal switch in the back of his brain still remembered even if he could not - they at least knew how to use a weapon.

He taught her, dismantling and reassembling the weapon in the hope that she would start to grasp its basic ballistics. Death, she knew about that already. He didn't have to explain about death and killing, so he didn't; that was the one small reprieve he allowed himself. Mostly her lessons were about when not to pull the trigger.

It was what Big Boss would have done.

And if Fox couldn't be near him, he could still try to emulate his standards. Stay unseen; make use of your surroundings; don't cover up weaknesses with bullets.

_Always believe in yourself._

She was younger than he'd been. A _lot_ younger. She'd cope much more easily. She'd also need more supervision. She needed to get the hell away from here, perhaps to America, but of all his contacts in every spy agency in the world there was only one man he'd trust to get her safely there.

The thought of trusting Big Boss with a child who - rightly or not - was in his care made his fingers tingle as he dialled the number, as if that circuit of muscle memory were signalling that it was still live, and he didn't let his voice shake, because the last thing he wanted Big Boss to know was that Fox had come to him in shame.

-

_IV_

When she asked if he'd ever been in love before, he told her that he didn't really know what 'love' _was_, and then she laughed, like he'd told her a joke, like that was a funny thing to say after you'd asked a woman to marry you. He realised she didn't know him very well, but that was okay. She'd have a lot of time to learn more about him.

He didn't know her very well either. They'd met about a month ago, and - he tried to look back through his memory but his lives had become tangled and crisscrossed, one trying to turn away and one trying to take what it had and hold it and run; it was hard to believe that his existence had once been predictable. Hard to see past this world of the last few weeks, full of chill air and thick grey snowclouds, where he and she were together and he'd never seen more colour or felt so much fire in his veins; and when she had said she didn't want to go back - too _cold, too empty_ - he had felt her words as if he had spoken them with his own voice.

She - this - was still a mystery to him.

He'd always found it easier to see the answers when they were written in flesh - warm and maybe moving or struggling or leaking blood or protruding jagged bone - If Frank could touch something, he could understand it.

They were touching, her hands resting lightly in his - soft and rather long, in keeping with her elegance; she had such grace and yet such physical strength, traits drilled into her body by a Communist athletics school until they seemed so natural it was as if she were born to skate. Frank knew how bodies were constructed; he had taken enough of them apart. He recognised her illusory perfection.

He put his hands to her back and rested his head against hers, feeling her breathe. He was still trying to fathom how he'd felt when she'd told him that she couldn't go back - that the ice, for all she'd been shaped for it, wasn't a place she could survive in any more. Her muscular back rose and fell under his hands, and he felt warm air turning in the sliver of space between her face and his own.

He didn't know about love, but this idea that she'd never meant for him to have, of taking her and Naomi - a child and a wife found in the wrong order, come in to his hands in two far-apart and equally unlikely places - and running away, keeping them hidden and protected somewhere, somehow - it had crept inside him and made him feel like one of his lives needed the other to end - not violently, but with quiet resignation.

His fingers tangled with the ends of her hair, and he asked himself how hard it would be to let go of everything that could still come between them. He didn't care that she was a Communist - allegiances changed with the times, and he had never believed that the Cold War was more than a sham. His comrades, the country he fought for, unimportant. Some things would always be with him - a couple of guns, Naomi, a machete, burdens so familiar as to be a part of him. What else was there left for him - for Gray Fox?

Only the one who always froze him in place even from an impassable distance - a butterfly-pin that held him to war, because war was ever - the only - their connection. A shared passion and belief and unspeakable pleasure that she would never understand.

He couldn't let her see it, couldn't have them both, could never have had him in any case. He just had to _stop reaching_, and hold her tight, and go.

He wanted to take the glass spire of his existence - the not-much that he'd stepped into the world with at the age of fifteen, cracks padded out with additional losses and recriminations - and reshape it around her. Because if he couldn't touch something - someone - he couldn't understand it, and she, she was someone he could touch.

-

_V_

For five years afterwards, Gray Fox stopped trying to live. He didn't talk to Naomi about what had happened with Gustava, and when she tried to talk about it to him, he stared at nothing and tried not to show his rage. He took as many wetwork missions as he could get himself assigned to, as if enough blood could clean his memory and quench all the thirsts he'd ever had for a life that involved anything except killing. And the blood soaked through the years, through his gloves and skin and bones until it spattered against that solid rock in his memory: _Big Boss didn't want it to be this way._

He was loyal to FOXHOUND, yes. He was a good Patriot mook. He wasn't trying to be more than that but he couldn't forget how much he'd once wanted more. Wanted to be_ alive_, to live for someone he believed in.

And when Big Boss came back it was as if everything had slid back, along blood-slicked rails, into place; it was a perfect mirror of his fondest memories. They were together, CO and elite agent, just like they'd been before he'd been left to lick his wounds alone, lose his mind, find disillusionment.

Like old times. He felt young again.

He basked in the trust placed in him by a man who he would do anything for. He realised, dimly, that this feeling had frozen inside him many years ago, just waiting for his hero to come home and offer Frank his leadership again in exchange for Frank's fealty and confidence. It had kept his feelings in place like an anchor, always moored close to Big Boss.

His commander confided in him about all of his plans and his objectives. Frank was often at his side, and always in contact via encrypted channels in case one of them needed to put a word in the other's ear. As Big Boss stuck pins into maps of Africa and central Asia, Frank watched him closely, with sidelong glances full of hidden warmth.

Long ago, this man had taught him to be honest with himself. Frank looked, and saw himself holding a candle up to an ice shelf.

He saw an old man, withered by time and anger into someone who hated the world and believed in nothing except destruction. Frank had been stuck in place, waiting, while the one he'd waited for had gone for good.

-

_VI_

Null cast away his anchor and drifted back into the void. He had missions to take, people to end, and orders to follow to perfection. The space between missions became crisp and white again. He wasn't searching for anything more.

He found it a year later at the end of a line of raw recruits, wearing a smirk and a crewcut that was already fraying lazily over his ears, and with all the life Null had ever seen in his commander glowering at him out of two clear blue eyes.


End file.
